In many practical searching applications, the input queries to an information retrieval system are much longer (roughly a paragraph of text) as compared to the average 2-3 keywords most of search engines are optimized for. For example, a majority of queries received by search engines such as commercial web search engines (WSEs) are very short (e.g., 2-3 keywords on an average). Most WSEs do not provide support for very long, verbose queries. Long queries (e.g., up to a sentence long) require adopting search techniques which negatively impact the response time of search engines. Further, due to the large number of terms in such long queries, mechanisms are required to take into account the relative distance between query terms in documents being searched.